Honesty, something that Rita Ouédraogo brings to our conversation, allows us to know what we can do and where we stand. Many misunderstandings in processes come from not explaining from the start what the conditions and intentions of the projects we work on are. Making them available provides a better understanding of the given structures in which we can work but cannot change. As she says, listening is an essential part of conversation. Discomfort is something that Rita relates to many of her experiences, from different positions and meanings. Far from being a stable place, discomfort is a situation that arises, that morphs, and that never quite goes away. What's more, for Rita it can become a curatorial strategy. Acknowledging that discomfort exists, is knowing how to listen to it when it appears. 

In Crystal's work, which combines the specifics of historical events with the abstraction of artistic gestures and the serendipity of processes, form can be felt in many ways. Crystal's films are temporary places to enter and engage in a sensory relationship with the stories they make present.

The witnessing relationship is also central to Crystal Z Campbell's work. Looking is not only a biological process, but also a historical one. They wonder in a public conversation: “How do we look at things we can't see?” Following Crystal's words, "looking should not be easy". Precisely when things are easy, our attention remains strategically distracted elsewhere, looking without seeing what is in front of us.

The conversation with Crystal Z Campbell took place and words in November 2023. They were in Saint Louis, Oklahoma and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series, was in Berlin. Another thing Crystal mentioned in their conversation: the situation of indirect witness towards so many materials, events, and situations, the acts of omission, the gaps in the narratives. There are still many gaps in the official narratives, but also in our professional stories.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

This collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium in fall 2021, at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in collaboration with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

This collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium in fall 2021, at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in collaboration with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

This collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium in fall 2021, at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in collaboration with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

In the many biographies that Laure Prouvost has written about herself over the years the artist strays from traditional artist biographies, describing her work according to the narrative and experiential drive of her projects and her way of naming them to ones where the institutional curriculum is replaced by a list of situations that her projects were able to create: Melting Into Another, an Occupied Paradise, Deep See Blue Surrounding You, a Waiting Room with objects, a New Museum for Grand Dad, A tearoom for Grand Ma, a lobby for love among the artists… Within these places we are no longer an impersonal audience, but characters who enter temporal worlds where fiction becomes materially present and real.

The difference between fiction and lying is a question Sonia Fernández Pan also shared with Laure Prouvost, inspired by how she never fully reveals what is fiction and what is not in her work. The storytelling surrounding her artistic practice is another element of her work, strategically confusing spheres that the traditional art system insists on keeping apart.

This conversation with Laure Prouvost took place in April 2022 in separate places. Sonia Fernández Pan was listening to Laure Prouvosts words from the computer and paying attention to the sound of the strokes of a drawing that Laure brought into their meeting. There are many similarities between writing and drawing. Both arise from the body; both produce a physical and intimate relationship between head and hands. The strokes of Laure's drawing added sound textures to her words. To listen to her voice and strokes, come in and enjoy.

The changeful history of the colonization of the Caribbean has left deep scars that are still present today. This is best known by artists and cultural practitioners who work in their own way on an identity of its own for the Antilles. The term “Caribbean” here is used primarily in a geographical sense to help overcoming local antagonisms between different political systems, languages, and cultures, while allowing artists of all origins to exchange ideas and thus work together on a Caribbean identity.

This series of podcasts aims to engage with a plurality of voices from different backgrounds to think with them on the diversity implicit in the notion of identity.

In one of her texts, «Friendship as a way of life: a culture of the lovers-friends», she begins by mentioning Michel Foucault and his conception of friendship as the center of queer becoming and relationships. What kind of relationships can exist outside the framework of the heterosexual norm? The norms of love make us love from within the norms. And can dangerously lead to love of the norms. With her concept she refers to a third space of relationship based on the encounter and practice of love: the lovers-friends ethic is about understanding that our lovers are our friends and vice versa, and that this ethic is a culture of resistance. It is a third space in a binary world. But betting on this ethic has painful consequences. The fact that relationships cannot be readable produces suffering and discomfort - if it is not monogamous and unconditional, if there is no renunciation and sacrifice, it is not perceived as real love. The realities of love instead should be more realistic. And friendly.

With "Expertise is the new genius" Justyna encapsulates in a few words a cultural narrative strongly rooted in contemporary music. This narrative gives special relevance to the mastery of technology by musicians, who know their own instruments like no one else does, after years of difficult and painstaking never-ending learning. One keeps feeding the narrative of expertise that, at the same time, offers resistance to being fully achieved. Moreover, the notion of expertise also resonates with a monogamous relationship to sound, in which each musician is the connoisseur, protector and keeper of a very specific type of music that distinguishes them from each other. The cultural logic of specialized expertise means, that, by contrast, a preference for eclecticism is perceived as not very serious, as recreation or as a weak commitment to musical learning.

There are further narratives arising from the patriarchal gaze that are assumed as norm in the field of music. Not only logics of progress and development, of improvement and advancement, are part of the history of sound. Also, the popular use of military concepts applied to the context of sound is very common, especially in the description of albums, songs or concerts. The genealogy of this language goes unnoticed, turning the musician into a sonic warrior. In her sophisticated perception of language, Justyna's definition of noise is not so much about sound as sonic matter per se, but about contextual perception and possible shifts in meaning. This conversation began with the relationship between sound and theatre, questioning the priority of the eye in what happens on stage and in the stalls, and ended by talking about a different kind of relationship to language through dyslexia and its resistance to normative learning sequences. Many other things came in between, including the desire to listen to music producers speak of intuition and the pleasures of the still unidentified.

SHELTER IN SOUNDS is the first episode that follows a conversation with musician and artist Sarah Badr. This conversation with Sarah Badr took place in mid-February 2021. As a composer, she produces music under the name FRKTL, her experimental solo project active since 2011. Throughout her life Sarah Badr has lived in different cities and has been exposed to different cultural contexts. Music, like smells or tastes, is a time machine. It reactivates the past, but it also awakens possible futures. Composing music for imaginary worlds that only exist in the digital world, as with the Matryoshka Club within Minecraft, is something that ties in with Sarah's long-standing passion for film soundtracks and music videos. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about music beyond the club and the stage.

The second episode of the series "Feminisms in the Caribbean", Writing in Hiatuses, is the result of an epistolary conversation through audio notes and emails with writer Marta Aponte Alsina. A storyteller, novelist and literary critic, Marta Aponte wrote her novel “La muerte feliz de William Carlos Williams” (The Happy Death of William Carlos Williams) out of a desire to write a book that she herself wanted to read. This novel, published in 2015, brings up fundamental issues in Marta Aponte's writing, such as the gaze of the foreigner, the extended ties of Puerto Rican culture, the rewriting of canonical texts, and womxn's voices.

Her first novel “Angélica Furiosa”, published in 1994, revives the figure of the witch and spiritism to explore Puerto Rican history from the margins and anti-colonial narratives. As an author of several novels and short stories, Marta Aponte is also prolific in essay writing, with titles such as “Somos Somos islas: ensayos de camino” (We Are Islands: Essays on the Road), published also 2015. As she herself wonders with her latest novel “PR3 Aguirre” (2018) in relation to the gaze of the one who writes: “Or do we write to map, to explore tributaries, to invade archives, to steal knowledge, to cannibalize the literature of the lords, to snatch the privilege of authorship from the one who wrote us in his own way, the better to cross us out?”

This podcast is part of the public program of the past show, “one month after being known in this island” curated by @yinajimenezs and @paguardiola by @caribbeanartinitiative, thanks to the support of @kbhg, Basel.

Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.

Screamers

This episode is based on a panel discussion with Chus Martínez, Quinn Latimer, Sonia Fernández Pan, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, and Barabara Casavecchia.

Sonia Fernández Pan is a (in)dependent curator who researches and writes through art and, since 2011, is the author of esnorquel, a personal project in the form of an online archive with podcasts, texts, and written conversations. She currently hosts the podcast series Feminism Under Corona and Corona Under the Ocean produced by the Art Institute and TBA21–Academy.

Martina-Sofie Wildberger is a performance artist working on the power of language, alternative ways of communicating, and the relationship between scribality and orality. Central to her practice is sound, the articulation of words, and the meanings constituted in the act of speaking as well as the poetic quality of language.

Barbara Casavecchia is a writer, curator, and educator based in Milan, and currently mentor of the Ocean Fellowship at Ocean Space, Venice, for TBA21–Academy.

Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.

Loop

In this episode Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro gives her lecture “Hyena Days,” in which she considers ideas and forms of fragment, continuance, colonial violence, and archive in the work of her chosen ancestors, particularly the exemplary work and life of the Black American lesbian poet and activist Audre Lorde. Her contribution is followed by a conversation with Quinn Latimer, Chus Martínez, and Italian writer, curator and educator Barbara Casavecchia.

Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.

Alta Ego

In this episode Tessa Mars, a Haitian visual artist living and working in Port-au-Prince, talks about her practice as a performance that is not limited to the living body. The ancestors she is specifically referring to are those heroes of the Haitian Revolution, enslaved peoples who famously rose up against and defeated French colonial rule and the system of slavery there.

Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.

Dancers

This episode is based on a lecture by Barbara Casavecchia, who is a writer, curator, educator based in Milan, and currently mentor of the Ocean Fellowship at Ocean Space, Venice, for TBA21–Academy. She is advocating for an embodied and entangled art and politics as found in her recent experience working within a set of queer and trans-feminist archives and collectives in Milan.

Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.

Social Tools

In this episode Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Isabel Lewis, Lynne Kouassi and Sadie Plant.

Isabel Lewis is a Berlin-based artist born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy, her work encompasses myriad forms, from lecture performances to workshops, music sessions, parties, hosted occasions, and large-scale artistic/programmatic works like the Institute for Embodied Creative Practices.

Lynne Kouassi is a Basel-based artist whose works explore the excluding effects of structural dominance and other normative orders, as well as the historical and social conditions that shape the relationship between body, gender, knowledge, and power. Her practice also addresses strategies for escaping control and questions of migration.

Sadie Plant is a British philosopher, cultural theorist, and author based in Biel/Bienne. In her research and writings, she offers an alternative, feminist account of the history and nature of digital technology, and the influence of psychoactive substances on Western culture.

Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.

Dreamers

In this episode Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Lynne Kouassi, a Basel-based artist whose works explore the excluding effects of structural dominance and other normative orders, as well as the historical and social conditions that shape the relationship between body, gender, knowledge, and power. Her practice also addresses strategies for escaping control and questions of migration.

The tenth and final episode of the Feminism Under Corona chapter follows a conversation with poet, playwright and theatre director Koleka Putuma. Author of the poetry book Collective Amnesia (2017) and the play No Easter Sunday for Queers (2017), she is Founder and Director of Manyano Media, a multidisciplinary project that produces and supports the work and stories of black queer artists and queer life.

In a digital encounter last year, Koleka and rapper and songwriter Sho Madjozi were talking about ways of moving the poetry industry forward. Apparently, the term poetry is not related to industrial production. However, a closer look shows that poetry is indeed a part of the industry. For not only books or the materials that make them up are produced, but poetry and its authors have to negotiate continuously with contracts, copyrights, royalties, dissemination and presentation processes, etc. The work of poets and the writers encompasses not only the writing itself alone, but at the same time a constant task of administration and care in order to not only understand the system of the cultural industry they belong to, but to find out how to be able to enact with it. It is for this reason that for Koleka, poetry includes everything that makes it happen in very different ways.

This conversation with Koleka Putuma took place at the end of January 2021. Koleka was in Cape Town and Sonia was in Berlin. They talked a lot about poetry, as a practice, as part of her early biography and as a working context. The pandemic appeared also from the social impact and political power that language holds. As we know, the very nature of a virus includes as part of its evolutionary process continuous transformations over time. The fact that these new variants appear in specific regions of this planet should not add national labels to the new mutations. They produce ideological implications and spread accumulated prejudices. And yet the media and many governments insist on referring territorially to processes that are beyond national identities. Structural violence against women and femicides are a pandemic long before the one produced by Covid-19. At the present time, not only do the two coexist structurally, but the current situation generally intensifies violence against women. Every Three Hours (2019) is a poem by Koleka Putuma that refers to the murder rate of womxn in South Africa and the insufficient state and social support to end this pervasive violence. In a world that depicts so many forms of violence in graphs and statistics, poetry and words are able to speak of what numbers do not count and do not tell.

In the Wake is a book that I started to read in other people's voices but that does not let itself be translated into other people's words. It has its own different grammar that reveals and recounts grammar as a form of power. It’s an essay written in first person that tells the history and present of the black diaspora, the structural and constitutive anti-blackness of white colonialism and capitalism. During our conversation, Christina emphasized that the use of the first person and her own biography when writing In the Wake is not intended to speak of her individual experience as exceptional, but rather as an exercise in openness towards the historical and structural dimension of the book. Black suffering, also black resistance, must be contextualized in the long history of structural anti-blackness. Christina also tells how some people have seen in In the Wake a book about Black Death when it is also a book about Black Life, about forms of collective resistance within a constantly hostile climate. "I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror," she says. Being “in the wake” also implies the existence and possibility of "wake work".

This conversation with Christina Sharpe took place at the end of December 2020. Christina was in Toronto and I was in Berlin. We began by talking about the sea and water and how her thinking is a thinking with water and with authors who think with water. It is also a form of tidal thinking, where Christina's voice carries many other voices and works in an explicit and non-linear way. Although speaking and writing can produce very different languages from each other, Christina Sharpe's way of speaking contains her writing and vice versa. In this conversation, not only do other voices appear within her own, but the writing itself becomes voice thanks to the organic becoming of talking into reading aloud. When writing is inscribed in bodies, they remind us that thinking is also visceral and material.

The changeful history of the colonization of the Caribbean has left deep scars that are still present today. This is best known by artists and cultural practitioners who work in their own way on an identity of its own for the Antilles. The term “Caribbean” here is used primarily in a geographical sense to help overcoming local antagonisms between different political systems, languages and cultures, while allowing artists of all origins to exchange ideas and thus work together on a Caribbean identity. This series of podcasts aims to engage with a plurality of voices from different backgrounds to think with them on the diversity implicit in the notion of identity.

The first episode follows a conversation with artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Her projects involve long periods of contact, observation and documentation of the places she chose to work with. Beatriz is aware of the camera as an experiential device and aesthetic instrument that expands the perception of the human eye and psyche, and a carrier and producer of ideology. Various types of gaze converge in it: the male gaze, the white gaze, the military gaze, the human gaze... This is why Beatriz Santiago Muñoz practice means thinking with places, with their differences and particularities, in order not to reproduce the same human and historical logic, for example, like the notion of the exotic, a mindset supported by the tourism industry, constantly reproducing Western colonial imaginaries.

Thinking with places, in the plural, is a way of accounting for the diversity of environments. It is also a way of overcoming the misleading binary division between the local and the universal. The material dimension of thinking not only refers to using a body to think, but to practice the thinking through objects. They are invisible agents within the history of thought and at the same time systems of interactions in constant transformation. The enormous production of images of our present makes us think that everything has been represented, that everything is visible. This is not true. What has been over-represented is a partial way of understanding reality, not realities themselves. Therefore, Beatriz proposes the possibility of creating images without spectators or even a cinema without an audience. Working from the margins of representation produces a marginal territory that questions the natural assumption of a center.

The rules imposed during the confinement have at no point taken into account the particularities and vital needs of many idiosyncrasies and individuals. In the case of the Roma people, restrictions on their traditional professions, itinerant trade, open-air markets and artistic creation have left many without work, income, and food. And it is seriously affecting the economic freedom of Romany women. The lack of political support and understanding has led to the creation of different networks between platforms and members of the Roma community. Silvia Agüero Fernández writes in one of her articles published in Pikara Magazine: “The Roma insurrection is the ultimate resistance to the established system, it is my alternative to a world, to a system of thought, economy and society that others have established”.

Together with Nicolás Jiménez Gonzalez, Silvia Agüero Fernández runs the project Pretendemos Gitanizar el Mundo, a valuable archive in process where they create and share a counter-narrative to fight structural and cultural anti-gitanismo. As a specific form of racism against Roma, anti-gitanismo is not only condoned but also trivialized. Their project proposes an in-depth study through numerous articles of scientific, historical and cultural popularization, while also providing support for institutions and associations that want to fight against anti-Roma harassments.

In the particular case of Romany women, anti-gitanismo is merged with structural patriarchy. As Silvia Agüero Fernández tells, feminism has always existed among Romany women. It is born and lived in the kitchens of homes and within families. It is a box of tools, values and struggles that are transmitted from women to women through emotional proximity and by ways of living together. The leader’s narrative, omnipresent in feminism, creates a herstory that makes invisible the work and daily forms of resistance of so many women throughout history. Within those forms there has been the feminism of Romany women for centuries, which is an ongoing collective anti-racist and anti-capitalist resistance.

As Mariam Khan herself says, seventeen texts are only seventeen voices within the myriad of ways Muslim women think and act around the world. When feminism is concerned only with a few women, then it ceases to be liberating and becomes a tool of oppression for a large number of women. One of the many clichés that Mariam Khan and all the authors of the book dismantle is the moral superiority of the secular West over religious cultures. Islam as a religion that empowers women is a constant affirmation in the book, which the authors demonstrate with historical facts and practices.

The conversation with Mariam Khan took place at the end of October 2020. She was in London and Sonia Fernández Pan in Berlin. With the arrival of autumn and the glaring increase of infections and deaths, most European governments have imposed a second lockdown. The state of vigilance and mutual accountability that has emerged during the pandemic is however not new to Muslim women in Western Societies. The Western Gaze is a form of violence that police their bodies and exoticizes them, misrepresenting Muslim women as submissive and equal to each other whereas the reality is very much different. Now that we all have to wear a mask in public for reasons of health and mutual care, a necessary question that reappears is: Why are some reasons more legitimate than others to cover or uncover faces or bodies? "It's not about the Burqa" is a book that brings up the present and past of Muslim women in the British context, but also their future. The fight for women’s right is to fight for all women’s right and all their different communities. Making it real may be complicated, but understanding it is the first step that has to be taken.

The second episode entitled The Monogamy of the System is a continous exchange with author and activist Brigitte Vasallo about the consequences and instrumentalization of the pandemic by governments, corporations and people in power. In order to shake up some common considerations about love and monogamy, this conversation aims to expand their meaning beyond the commonplace and romantic ideas which seem to be even more predominant in the current situation of personal and political isolations.

The first episode called “A one flavor reality” is a continuation of a conversation with artist Ran Zhang about the effects and consequences of Covid-19 in a reality that is also mutating despite the confinement of our bodies being locked at home.

The first conversation Pan had about Covid-19 with the artist Ran Zhang took place in Paris by the end of January 2020, on the occasion of her exhibition Resolution of Traits at the independent space L'ahah. The virus that had caused a new disease, first in Wuhan and China, was now appearing in France and by then no longer an alien entity but instead becoming an European reality. Despite the many speculations we shared in Paris, neither of them imagined that the outcome would be a global pandemic and confinement. But already then they felt the awakening of Western prejudices about the Chinese community.

The second conversation with Ran took place in April 2020 in Berlin during two different moments. She was staying at home in her room in Neukölln and Pan was staying in Kreuzberg, connected within the digital-turn of human relations at a time when contact between bodies is forbidden-but-not-forgotten and when time seems to have stopped to move forward more quickly. This conversation with Ran is an attempt to approach the current situation from her personal experience, from her situated knowledge and from her enormous and sparkling ability for story-telling: Viruses, molecular structures, prejudices, feminist prejudices, food markets, factories, systems of work, care and affection, the couple and the coupledom, confinement, hyper-productivity, turnings and turnouts shaped this in-between conversation. Our wish: to add more flavors to a reality that seems to be stuck in one single flavor.

Our guests were: Rossella Biscotti, Neha Choksi, Ingela Ihrman, Institute of Queer Ecology, Sophie Jung, Lysann König, Thomas Lempertz, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė), Katrin Niedermeier, Heather Phillipson, Mathilde Rosier, Lena Maria Thüring.

In this episode artist Rossella Biscotti presents her body of works dealing with ancient storytelling and both biological and psychological phenomena like growth and resilience.

Artist Rossella Biscotti’s (born in Molfetta, Italy, lives and works in Brussels and Rotterdam) artistic oeuvre encompasses videos, photographs and sculptural work. She uses montage as a gesture to reveal individual narratives and their relation to society. In her cross-media practice, cutting across filmmaking, performance and sculpture, she explores and reconstructs obscured moments from recent times, often against the backdrop of state institutions. In the process of composing her personal encounters and oral interrogations into new stories, the site of investigation tends to leave its mark on her sculptures and installations. By examining the relevance of the recovered material from a contemporary perspective, Biscotti sensibly weaves a link to the present.

Our guests were: Rossella Biscotti, Neha Choksi, Ingela Ihrman, Institute of Queer Ecology, Sophie Jung, Lysann König, Thomas Lempertz, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė), Katrin Niedermeier, Heather Phillipson, Mathilde Rosier, Lena Maria Thüring.

In this episode Neha Choksi, Sophie Jung and Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė (New Mineral Collective) are in conversation with Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez about ways of dealing with violence and aggression both on artistic and institutional level.

Artist Sophie Jung (lives in London and Basel) works across text, sculpture and performance, navigating the politics of representation and challenging the selective silencing that happens by concluding. Her focus is on disrupting dominant scripts through subversively introduced tremors. She employs humor, shame, the absurd, raw anger, rhythm and rhyme, slapstick, hardship, friendship and a constant stream of slippages. Her sculptural work consists of bodies made up of both found and haphazardly produced attributes and defines itself against the dogma of an Original Idea or a Universal Significance. Her writing is done in an intersectional-feminist spirit of écriture feminine.

Artist Neha Choksi lives and works in Los Angeles and Bombay, India. Working in performance, video, installation, sculpture, and other formats, she disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in the lives of everything—from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Involving a confluence of disciplines, in various formats, often collaboratively and in unconventional settings, she allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural and social contexts to revisit the entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialization.

Artists Tanya Busse (born in Moncton, NB, Canada, lives in Tromsø, Norway) and Emilija Škarnulytė (born in Vilinus, Lithuania, lives in Tromsø, Norway) are New Mineral Collective (NMC), a platform that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth’s surface. As an organism, NMC infiltrates the extractive industry with alternative forces such as desire, body mining, and acts of counter prospecting.

Our guests were: Rossella Biscotti, Neha Choksi, Ingela Ihrman, Institute of Queer Ecology, Sophie Jung, Lysann König, Thomas Lempertz, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė), Katrin Niedermeier, Heather Phillipson, Mathilde Rosier, Lena Maria Thüring.

In this episode Neha Choksi and Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė (New Mineral Collective) are introducing their artistic practices and presenting alternative ways of engaging with environmental and social questions.

Artist Neha Choksi lives and works in Los Angeles and Bombay, India. Working in performance, video, installation, sculpture, and other formats, she disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in the lives of everything—from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Involving a confluence of disciplines, in various formats, often collaboratively and in unconventional settings, she allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural and social contexts to revisit the entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialization.

Artists Tanya Busse (born in Moncton, NB, Canada, lives in Tromsø, Norway) and Emilija Škarnulytė (born in Vilinus, Lithuania, lives in Tromsø, Norway) are New Mineral Collective (NMC), a platform that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth’s surface. As an organism, NMC infiltrates the extractive industry with alternative forces such as desire, body mining, and acts of counter prospecting.

Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around the possibilities for universal truths versus a relative view of human temporality and finitude, rational thinking and the notion of men as ‘symbolic animals’, creating a universe of symbolic meanings, versus our being-in-the-world, perceiving the world via our relationship to time. Taking the Davos disputation in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, as a starting point, this ‘continental divide’ (as Peter E. Gordon called it) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ as per Henning Ritter – 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we are repeating the question that led the historical debate: Was ist der Mensch? What is it to be human? This vast theme is broken down into several more specific discourses, concerning especially the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

Diputanziuns Susch 2019 speakers were: Grażyna Kulczyk (founder and president of the board, Art Stations Foundation CH), Mareike Dittmer (director Art Stations Foundation CH & chair Disputaziuns Susch), Aleksandra Mir (Poland-born artist, Swedish-American citizen based in London), Timotheus Vermeulen (Dutch scholar and critic, associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway), Tadeusz Slawek (Polish lyricist, essayist, translator, literary critic and professor), Elisabeth Bronfen (Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic, professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich and global distinguished professor at New York University), Marcus Steinweg (French-German philosopher, professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe), Mark Sadler (Scottish artist & writer, guest professor at UdK, Berlin), Jörg Heiser (German philosopher and art historian, director Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin)

Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around the possibilities for universal truths versus a relative view of human temporality and finitude, rational thinking and the notion of men as ‘symbolic animals’, creating a universe of symbolic meanings, versus our being-in-the-world, perceiving the world via our relationship to time. Taking the Davos disputation in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, as a starting point, this ‘continental divide’ (as Peter E. Gordon called it) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ as per Henning Ritter – 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we are repeating the question that led the historical debate: Was ist der Mensch? What is it to be human? This vast theme is broken down into several more specific discourses, concerning especially the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

Diputanziuns Susch 2019 speakers were: Grażyna Kulczyk (founder and president of the board, Art Stations Foundation CH), Mareike Dittmer (director Art Stations Foundation CH & chair Disputaziuns Susch), Aleksandra Mir (Poland-born artist, Swedish-American citizen based in London), Timotheus Vermeulen (Dutch scholar and critic, associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway), Tadeusz Slawek (Polish lyricist, essayist, translator, literary critic and professor), Elisabeth Bronfen (Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic, professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich and global distinguished professor at New York University), Marcus Steinweg (French-German philosopher, professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe), Mark Sadler (Scottish artist & writer, guest professor at UdK, Berlin), Jörg Heiser (German philosopher and art historian, director Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin)

The first episode in a series of chapters from Disputaziuns Susch, an annual conference scheme hosted by Art Stations Foundation CH and Grazyna Kulczyk, has Aleksandra Mir imagining an artist and a scientist sitting on a train where a conversation ensues about objective realities, space exploration, negative space and belief.

In spring 1929, just a glimpse before the Great Depression and the Great Crash to come soon, the Cassirer-Heidegger debate takes place in Davos; Ernst Cassirer pulls his arguments for a broader conception of humanity, his counterpart is Martin Heidegger and his relativism. The quest of a universal truth drives a ‘continental divide’ (Peter E. Gordon) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ (Henning Ritter), anticipating major philosophical debates to come. 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we were repeating the question that led the historical debate: What is it to be human?

Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around the possibilities for universal truths versus a relative view of human temporality and finitude, rational thinking and the notion of men as ‘symbolic animals’, creating a universe of symbolic meanings, versus our being-in-the-world, perceiving the world via our relationship to time. Taking the Davos disputation in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, as a starting point, this ‘continental divide’ (as Peter E. Gordon called it) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ as per Henning Ritter – 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we are repeating the question that led the historical debate: Was ist der Mensch? What is it to be human? This vast theme is broken down into several more specific discourses, concerning especially the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

Diputanziuns Susch 2019 speakers were: Grażyna Kulczyk (founder and president of the board, Art Stations Foundation CH), Mareike Dittmer (director Art Stations Foundation CH & chair Disputaziuns Susch), Aleksandra Mir (Poland-born artist, Swedish-American citizen based in London), Timotheus Vermeulen (Dutch scholar and critic, associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway), Tadeusz Slawek (Polish lyricist, essayist, translator, literary critic and professor), Elisabeth Bronfen (Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic, professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich and global distinguished professor at New York University), Marcus Steinweg (French-German philosopher, professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe), Mark Sadler (Scottish artist & writer, guest professor at UdK, Berlin), Jörg Heiser (German philosopher and art historian, director Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin)

In spring 1929, just a glimpse before the Great Depression and the Great Crash to come soon, the Cassirer-Heidegger debate takes place in Davos; Ernst Cassirer pulls his arguments for a broader conception of humanity, his counterpart is Martin Heidegger and his relativism. The quest of a universal truth drives a ‘continental divide’ (Peter E. Gordon) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ (Henning Ritter), anticipating major philosophical debates to come. 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we were repeating the question that led the historical debate: What is it to be human?

Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around the possibilities for universal truths versus a relative view of human temporality and finitude, rational thinking and the notion of men as ‘symbolic animals’, creating a universe of symbolic meanings, versus our being-in-the-world, perceiving the world via our relationship to time. Taking the Davos disputation in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, as a starting point, this ‘continental divide’ (as Peter E. Gordon called it) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ as per Henning Ritter – 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we are repeating the question that led the historical debate: Was ist der Mensch? What is it to be human? This vast theme is broken down into several more specific discourses, concerning especially the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

Diputanziuns Susch 2019 speakers were: Grażyna Kulczyk (founder and president of the board, Art Stations Foundation CH), Mareike Dittmer (director Art Stations Foundation CH & chair Disputaziuns Susch), Aleksandra Mir (Poland-born artist, Swedish-American citizen based in London), Timotheus Vermeulen (Dutch scholar and critic, associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway), Tadeusz Slawek (Polish lyricist, essayist, translator, literary critic and professor), Elisabeth Bronfen (Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic, professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich and global distinguished professor at New York University), Marcus Steinweg (French-German philosopher, professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe), Mark Sadler (Scottish artist & writer, guest professor at UdK, Berlin), Jörg Heiser (German philosopher and art historian, director Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin)

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Manuela Moscoso, Elena Filipovic, Nikola Dietrich.

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Manuela Moscoso, Nadine Wietlisbach, Fanni Fetzer and Sophie Jung (from the audience).

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Raffael Dörig, Fanni Fetzer, Nadine Wietlisbach, Sabine Himmelsbach.

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Mareike Dittmer, Manuela Moscoso, Marie Muracciole, iLiana Fokianaki, Sophie Jung (artist from the audience).

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Ines Goldbach, Sophie Jung (artist in the audience), Manuela Moscoso, Mareike Dittmer, iLiana Fokianaki, Elfi Turpin.

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with iLiana Fokianaki, Marie Muracciole, Mareike Dittmer.

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Elfi Turpin, Ines Goldbach, Marie Muracciole.

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with iLiana Fokianaki, Claire Hoffmann, Mareike Dittmer.

The second roundtable on women networks and the women movement in Switzerland focused on collaborative projects.

The guests speakers are Bice Curiger, Mara Züst and Simone Koller, moderated by Claire Hoffmann.

The first roundtable on the figure of the witch in feminist movements and its return in contemporary art presented two exhibition projects on the topic.

The guests speakers are Caroline Cournède and Daniela Brugger, moderated by Anna Colin.